In common usage, property means "one's own thing" and refers to the relationship between individuals and the objects which they see as being their own to dispense with as they see fit. Scholars in the social sciences frequently conceive of property as a 'bundle of rights and obligations.' They stress that property is not a relationship between people and things, but a relationship between people with regard to things. Property is often conceptualized as the rights of 'ownership' as defined in law. Private property is that which belongs to an individual; public property is that which belongs to a community collectively or a State.
Outside of common usage the concept of 'property' or 'ownership' has no single or universally accepted definition. Various scholarly communities (e.g., law, economics, anthropology, sociology) may treat the concept more systematically, but their definitions likewise vary within and between fields.
General characteristics
Modern property rights conceive of ownership and possession as belonging to legal individuals, even if the legal individual is not a real person. Thus, corporations, governments and other collective forms of ownership are framed in terms of individual ownership. Exceptions to this pattern include the "commons", which belong to a defined community, and the "public domain", to which access is unlimited.
Property rights are found in the oldest written laws, and equate the expectation of use or profit to some payment from the very beginning. Modern property rights can be said to begin with the transition from ownership by entities as being the primary form of property right, to the theory that property rights are to promote the general good, and specifically encourage economic development and utilization of property.
Property is usually thought of in terms of a bundle of rights as defined and protected by the local sovereignty. Ownership, however, does not necessarily equate with sovereignty. If ownership gave supreme authority it would be sovereignty, not ownership. These are two different concepts.
Traditionally, that bundle of rights includes:
- control use of the property
- benefit from the property (examples: mining rights and rent)
- transfer or sell the property
- exclude others from the property.
Legal systems have evolved to cover the transactions and disputes which arise over the possession, use, transfer and disposal of property, most particularly involving contracts. Positive law defines such rights, and a judiciary is used to adjudicate and to enforce.
In his classic text, "The Common Law", Oliver Wendell Holmes describes property as having two fundamental aspects. The first is possession, which can be defined as control over a resource based on the practical inability of another to contradict the ends of the possessor. The second is title, which is the expectation that others will recognize rights to control resource, even when it is not in possession. He elaborates the differences between these two concepts, and proposes a history of how they came to be attached to individuals, as opposed to families or entities such as the church.
According to Adam Smith, the expectation of profit from "improving one's stock of capital" rests on private property rights, and the belief that property rights encourage the property holders to develop the property, generate wealth, and efficiently allocate resources based on the operation of the market is central to capitalism. From this evolved the modern conception of property as a right which is enforced by positive law, in the expectation that this would produce more wealth and better standards of living.